I Edited the Unabomber
LEVIN, MARTIN
I Edited the Unabomber Strange to say, his first published piece was in a humor column. BY MARTIN LEVIN According to a news report, the Unabomber has a 548-page book on the list of a small...
...Which was responsible for the basketful of cancelled checks I was discarding without too much thought...
...Kaczynski bristles at the management of society by technocrats...
...The Una-bomber...
...Can't find fault with that...
...Maybe I'm a poor psychobiographer...
...Somewhere along the way, however, it's obvious that Kaczynski plunged disastrously off the rails...
...And if anybody doesn't like all this, the psychologists of the future will be able to fix him so he does like it...
...Theodore J. Kaczynski...
...That's because I recently came to realize that I was the Unabomber's original editorial patron...
...Others were made out to writers yet uncelebrated...
...BY MARTIN LEVIN According to a news report, the Unabomber has a 548-page book on the list of a small publisher, who's quoted as saying that parts of the book are "disarming, even funny...
...O. Henry's short stories don't dwell on his jail time for embezzlement, you can't tell from the historical novels of Anne Perry that she was an accomplice to a murder, and, yes—the Unabomber could write funny...
...In the future, speculates Kaczynski, cities will be covered by "vast domes" to control the climate...
...Some items I felt I had to keep as collectibles, like my mother-in-law's recipe for hazelnut cookies and my father's draft notice for the army of Czar Nicholas II...
...My conclusion is inconclusive...
...All had in common the gift of wit...
...This column was a miscellany of humor written by contributors who received an honorarium for their work...
...I hadn't kept the decades old Saturday Review issue, but the catacombs of Columbia's Butler Library turned up microfilm of a satire entitled "The Wave of the Future...
...It came as a shock to discover that his only non-polemical piece to see the light of day had appeared in the "Phoenix Nest," my humor column that ran in Saturday Review for a number of years...
...By pure chance, I spotted one cancelled check made out to an author Martin Levin is a writer in New York...
...named Kaczynski...
...Kaczynski votes for transparent domes "so people can look at the sky"—not the haphazard heavens we are familiar with, but a sky defined by "cloud control...
...Clouds will be timed so accurately that you will be able to set your watch by them...
...Go figure...
...Especially since David Gelern-ter, Kaczynski's most articulate casualty, is my favorite social critic...
...Disarming" may be an unfortunate choice of words, but I can testify that "funny" could be applicable...
...It would be helpful to find a clue to criminality in the Unabomber's satire...
...The only question is whether these domes should be opaque or transparent...
...But with this piece as Exhibit A, I can find no more sociopathic symptoms than in Orwell or Swift...
...Some checks were made out to the illustrious—James Thurber, George S. Kaufman, Ogden Nash, Peter DeVries, and the like...
...The Wave of the Future" is a prophetic swipe at a nanny-state that has tried to monitor everything from ozone depletion to toilet flushing...
...I was made aware of this when we moved a short time ago, and I began to throw out a kitchen midden of memorabilia...
...Kaczynski...
...A writer's bad vibrations (like those of Ezra Pound) are sometimes packaged with the product...
...Others I thought I could toss out en masse, like the paperwork for "Phoenix Nest...
...Trust me...
...But criminal tendencies don't always surface in an author's work...
...On the premise that "it is not good for science to have no control over something," Kaczynski sees a future when the technologists will have control over everything, including the shape of cloud formations...
Vol. 5 • June 2000 • No. 37
